Hi Chuck, As a quick fix on the make installer media work, how can I remake my own installation ISO by recompil ing the kernel and initramfs ?
Can give me some directions ? Thanks a lot. John Mok On Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 12:08 Chuck Zmudzinski <brchu...@netscape.net> wrote: > On 8/19/2021 3:11 PM, Andy Smith wrote: > > Hi Chuck, > > > > On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 08:04:43AM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > >> After some testing of the Debian 11 installer on Xen > >> (using the debian-11.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso), I find that > >> this image only supports installation into a Xen PV guest, > >> the guest always crashes and reboots for either a BIOS > >> or OVMF boot into an HVM Xen guest. > > Could you report this to Debian's Xen team as a bug? Perhaps it is > > as simple as needing different kernel options in the netinst > > installer kernel given that the full install works under HVM? > Hi Andy, > > That is exactly what I think the problem is. I will look into it and see if > there is a simple solution like adding the correct kernel configuration > options and kernel modules to the kernel and ramdisk on the default > debian installer iso. The generic default amd64 iso should work in > Xen HVM guests. > > > > The Debian Xen team is very under-resourced for human help and it > > has been a long time since they have managed to keep the version in > > stable to a recent and supported one upstream. If you run a Xen dom0 > > on Debian I think really you need to be building your own packages > > or using the Debian Xen team's packages from sid. > > > > The stable packaged 4.11 hypervisor is out of even security support > > upstream so it's not really suitable for production use. > With bullseye released, that is oldstable now. Xen 4.14 is on bullseye > and I think Xen 4.15 is the latest release upstream, so it is not > too far behind now. I presume Xen 4.14 is still getting security patches > upstream, but I cannot find a good explanation of Xen's support > cycle on their website and I don't know if Debian can expect upstream > to support 4.14 until bullseye becomes oldstable in two years or so. > > I don't > > think the Debian Xen team would recommend using it but would instead > > suggest using their newer package that;s in sid (on stable) and > > test/report bigs against that. But let's get this reported. > If/when I find the solution, I will post a bug report and see if the Xen > team can get the solution into the installer media for future bullseye > point releases. I already know the same problem exists on Xen 4.14 > on bullseye, and AFAIK even sid has not bumped to 4.15 yet. > > > > I'm not skilled enough in Debian package building to help the team > > but I do still report bigs sometimes; for production use I am > > building packages from newer upstream source. > > > > For this problem I can't help as I don't run HVM guests (only PV and > > PVH). > I always had difficulty with pygrub/pvgrub on PV domains, and using > bullseye's Xen-4.14 version, I could not boot the debian installer iso > with pygrub but had to extract the xen-enabled kernel and ramdisk to > Dom0 and boot them from within Dom0. I think this is another Xen > bug in the Xen-4.14 package that I also will investigate next week. > Probably some tweaks to the pygrub script are needed there. > > I have always wanted to try out PVH domains, but have not done so > yet. > > > > The Debian Xen team mailing list is at: > > https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-xen-devel > I will do some testing on this next week. I do want to help the Xen team > make Debian more Xen-friendly and will report these bugs, hopefully > sometime next week. > > Cheers, > > Chuck > > > > Cheers, > > Andy > > > >
